


The Coldest Winter

by hawkwing_lb



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-05-04 15:07:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5338577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawkwing_lb/pseuds/hawkwing_lb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She twelve years old. She remembers.</p><p>It is the coldest winter of her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Coldest Winter

**Author's Note:**

> A few years ago, I wrote quite a bit of fic for _Dragon Age_. I came across this one (and a few others) while moving files off an old USB key, and thought I might as well repost it here.
> 
> Contains twelve-year-old Kallian Tabris, winter, and parental death. Pre-DA:O.

It is the coldest winter of her life.  
  
Ice scums the alienage's filthy ditches. The mud streets are rimed with sharp coldness that slices numb feet through ragged wrappings, and within a week of first frost there's a shem knifed on Brassbone Corner for the sake of his patched and leaky boots. Huddling in the doorways of the doss houses and tenements along Pillar Stream, whores and drunks who can't afford the half-copper for a share in a bed die of exposure in the night. The hahren and the elders go out among the freezing and the starving, but men and women die regardless.  
  
Not all of them from the cold.  
  
It is Wintersend when Kallian Tabris rises from her straw mattress to find her mother counting the coppers hidden beneath the loose flag on the hearth. The fire is banked low, watery barley pottage simmering on the heaped ashes. The weak glow of the embers reflects from Adaia's cold-pinched face, the lines around her eyes drawn tight with strain. "Your father sent a message last night," she says, as Kallian helps herself hungrily to their meagre breakfast. "The bann's docked his wage. Again."  
  
Cyrion Tabris is in service. Kallian sees her father but once a month, on the single day he has free from duty. It was different, she recalls dimly, when she was very small, when Cyrion's master had been the bann's father. Easier, perhaps. But she is rising twelve and no longer small, and life has not been anything close to easy for a long time.  
  
The pottage barely fills her stomach, and rent is due this quarter, at the month's end.  
  
"I can maybe lift some purses in the market," Kallian says, dubiously.  
  
Winter is a dangerous season for purse-trimming: heavy cloaks get in the way, numb fingers fumble, and fewer people dare the cold to begin with. It was in winter, three years gone, that the market watch took up Adaia on her second charge of theft. Kallian shivers, despite the warmth of the pottage in her belly and the heavy shawl around her shoulders. There's a brand at the base of both her mother's thumbs now, T for thief raised white and old, and scars on her back.  _Once a thief for the pillory, twice a thief for the lash, thrice it's a gallows' jig and then burned to ash_ , as the children's rhyme went. True for purse-trimming in the market, although roof-trimming - house-breaking - jumps straight to the  _lash_. It's why her mother hasn't done any roof work since old Nanna and little Darrian died in the plague year, and why Adaia has trained Kallian up to most of the market-lifting. She hasn't been caught and marked. It's less of a risk.  
  
But Adaia shakes her head, sharp. "I won't have you at it, not this season. Not when we need more than coppers. Roof-work pays better, and I still know some boys in the prigging line." She regards her daughter with tired worry. "I know we can't always, but I want you to stick to honest work as much as you can, Kalli. It's safer."  
  
Kallian wipes the last of her pottage from her bowl with a finger. The soft barley grain catches in her teeth as she licks it clean. Going hungry is plenty safe, until the cold kills you, or weakness does. But her mother is her mother, tired concern and all. Arguing changes nothing. She says, "I know, Mama," and wraps her feet against the cold. The hahren will feed her a noon meal for chopping wood, and daylight's wasting  
  
#  
  
The next night, Adaia doesn't come home. Kallian curls in a blanket by the hearth's embers and waits, apprehension gnawing her bones.  
  
When dawn breaks with still no sign of Adaia, apprehension becomes dread.  
  
#  
  
_Thrice it's a gallows' jig and then burned to ash_.  
  
She learns her mother's fate from a crier in the market. The shem her mother meant to rob - a master craftsman, a member in good standing of the Worshipful Company of Denerim Girdlers - is wealthy enough to keep private guards at his townhouse. Adaia had slipped, in the cold and ice, and found herself discovered.   
  
It turns out that wealthy men's guards do not trouble themselves to wait for a magistrate. They ran her through - this detail she learns from a stable-boy at the master girdler's house, an elf-blood shem who knows (who _knew_ ) Adaia to see - and called the Market watch to collect the body.  
  
The watch-sergeant tells her she can see her mother's body when she can pay for the pyre. Almost, she curses his parents and spits in his face -  
  
\- except that will win her nothing, and give him an excuse to take his cudgel to a knife-eared brat. She swallows her rage along with her grief, trudges back to the alienage against the biting wind. She will have to tell her father soon. She's not looking forward to that.  
  
Tears freeze on her cheeks. Her raw hands are fisted under her clothes. It's the way the world works. It is the way things  _are_.  
  
But that's the opposite of comfort.  
  
_I will survive_ , she tells herself. Grief is a hollow abscess in her chest. Chill savage fury surrounds it, filling up the empty spaces.  _I will survive, and I will_ remember.  
  
She twelve years old. She remembers.  
  
It is the coldest winter of her life.


End file.
